West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

This could mean that cold, calculating practitioners of Realpolitik, whose main concerns are, quite frankly, those of power politics, appear in the last analysis more reasonable and less unjust than crusading types. Or conversely, it could mean that it is the reality of international power configurations and glossing over gross violations of the human rights of backward or helpless people that set the course toward brutality and villainy in international affairs. If the former, then Japanese desistence from challenging the American annexations of Hawaii and the Philippines proved entirely correct. They could rectify the balance later, in Korea and Manchuria. But if the latter, a forthright Japanese challenge to the pretensions of American imperial democracy would have been more appropriate. To sell out 50,000 Japanese in Hawaii for $75,000 was cheapness indeed, to say nothing of the aspirations of Filipinos, which American forces were busily suppressing.

Of course, history is not so black and white. How could Japan, in 1898, seriously protest American seizure of the Philippines, when she had herself, in 1895, seized Formosa, for which her pacification campaign was not yet concluded, to say nothing of Korea, which was coming along? And anyway, what do we want? A Japanese-American war in 1898? Certainly not. We had best put this thorny sequence of ideas aside. Let us retrieve our shaken moorings with that good old sign post in Far Eastern affairs, the Open Door policy.